Friday, April 12, 2013

Although Baz
Luhrmann's upcoming film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, starring
Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, was shot on location in Australia,
the original inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel was our own Long
Island.

While based in New York in the early twenties, Fitzgerald and his wife
Zelda rented a house at 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck, which would become the
inspiration for the novel's West Egg. Just across Manhasset Bay, the
neighboring village of Sand's Point would become known as East Egg. The north
shore of Long Island, dubbed the “Gold Coast”, was at its heyday lined with
over 1,200 grand country homes dotting the shoreline. Approximately 400 of these
survive today; many are still in private hands, while others are open to the
public.

The Fitzgeralds,
perhaps surprisingly, moved to Long Island to save money after the birth of
their child. The Gateway Drive house, a short walk from the Great Neck Long
Island Rail Road station, rented for only $300 a month (about $3,000 in today’s
money), compared to the $200 a week they were spending to stay at a hotel in
Manhattan. Though Fitzgerald had enjoyed some success on the heels of his first
and second novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful
and the Damned, the celebrity couple was well known to live
extravagantly—and often above their means.As development on
Long Island’s North Shore increased, the larger, more private, and thus more
fashionable, estates were spreading eastwards towards Sands Point (East Egg). Villages
like Great Neck became more populated, with smaller plots of land and a closer
vicinity to one’s neighbors. The Fitzgeralds fellow residents included theater
folks (like Groucho Marx and Basil Rathbone), stockbrokers, bootleggers, and
fellow writers like Fitzgerald’s neighbor and friend, Ring Lardner.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
likely drove his rented Rolls Royce over to Lardner’s house on the bay, where
it was said the two liked to sit on the porch, drinking and looking out across
the water, and next door to Fitzgerald’s publisher, Herbert Bayard Swope’s,
“Gatsby-style” parties. Swope would eventually move across the bay and buy a
grand estate called as Keewaydin, which is often referred to as one of Fitzgerald's inspiration for the character Daisy Buchanan's home.